


A Trial In Crimson

by Adam_Typing



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-09-16
Packaged: 2018-02-17 15:25:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2314346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adam_Typing/pseuds/Adam_Typing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Order of the Argent Flame find their chapel home destroyed and its reliquaries ransacked, the desperate survivors find themselves on the hunt for those who have wronged them. Even as darker secrets rear their heads and the agents of the Arch-Enemy reveal themselves, Canoness Demeste and her loyal Battle Sisters strive to find the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Trial In Crimson

_ **A Trial Of Crimson** _

_A Sisters of Battle Novel_

****  
  


**In The Wake of A Lie**

_Safety and home and sanctuary shouldn’t smell like ash,_ she decides.

_It shouldn’t leave a taste in the mouth like I’m close to throwing up, shouldn’t make my eyes sting and my throat tighten up._

She stoops, fingers trailing in the ash that has fallen like snow. It leaves the fingers of her gauntlet soot stained and dull. When she feels something heavier in the drifts, she lifts whatever it is free. It helps distract her from the weeping she can hear, and from the silence of the others who should be cheering. Hadn’t they expected to find their home?

Demeste, Oathsworn Sister of the Argent Flame, lifts a fine chain from the ash. The hanging decoration is coated, choked in debris. Her bolter goes to her waist, locking into its holster. She raises a hand to brush the grey away. Someone behind her drops to their knees, ash kicking up in a choking gust, and Demeste looks over her shoulder at the sound.

Her Sisters, a Crusade Force of over a hundred, stand on a plateau of broken, churned earth and swathes of dust. They stand like spectres in ruins, some obscured by walls that jut like broken, ill set teeth. Others emerge from the tumbled down towers, weapons held in loose, nerveless grips. Some start at the collapse of walls, at the sudden winds that blow ash up in looming clouds. Gun muzzles hunt like the snouts of hounds. Armour the colour of shallow oceans lose their shine and gloss to the ash. Cloaks of brilliant reds grow heavy with dust and their vibrancy is bleached pale with dust.

Demeste turns her attention to her sisters, letting the icon swing from her hand. It sheds its coating, a faint hint of brass in her grip. An eagle sways from the chain, twinned head, spread winged. Something, heat and kinetics most likely, has warped it into a curled, crumpled thing of splintered feathers. She wades through the ash, stepping through to the kneeling Sister. Demeste places a hand on her shoulder, kneeling beside her. She has no words for the moment, nothing to say. Instead, she simply helps the shaking, furious woman to her feet.

She breaks the haunted silence. For the first time since they arrived where their home should be, she speaks, “We need to find shelter.”

As she speaks, the storm clouds break over head, and rain begins to fall on the Abbey in the Mountains. A hundred and fifty Sisters of Battle gather up their weapons, and trudge towards one of the ruined Convent Barracks. They trace the paths they known purely by memory, by remembering the roads and cloisters that used to wind through the Abbey. Demeste is the last to enter the ruined halls. She glances over her ruined home, and closes the cracked and heat blackened door behind her. The darkness of the Barracks swallows them… Armour braziers, flamers and lumen-flasks serve to stamp it back, to stem and dam it. They right battered tables and podiums, find torches and ceremonial fire bowls. They light them.

Rain trickles and squirms its way in, through cracks in stone and broken windows. In some places it winds down the walls in slow trails. In others it burbles and chortles like an overflowing gutter. The spill has ruined wall hangings, tapestries and oath papers that have already been stained with fire and blood and smoke. Some of the sisters begin to take the priceless heirlooms from their brackets and cases, saving them from the worst of the rain. Demeste saves them the effort, telling them to leave the hangings be. She undoes her helm, breathing in unfiltered air. For a moment, she blanches, her back to her sisters, as she tastes nothing but smoke.

She catches her reflection in broken, sooty glass. Dusk skinned, dark haired, thin lipped. She hasn’t ever seen herself make such a pained expression. She swallows down bile, and sets her helmet back on. She takes her bolter up, unfolding the skeleton stock, and bracing it. The safety goes off in a click that is far too loud.

“I know it’s painful… but we need to clear this area. I don’t know if whatever did this is still here. So everyone be alert. Light all you can, salvage what is useful or too valuable to leave behind.”

At the mention of leaving, her sisters stall in their movements. One of them undoes her own helmet, revealing a pale, scarred and wounded face. It’s twisted into a more pained expression by what’s happened here. “Demeste- Canoness, we’re going to be leaving?” she asks, quietly. She moves awkwardly, with a strange jerkiness and the hiss of electricity follows her.

“Seraphim Talessa, we will be. When we gather what supplies remain usable and find out what we can from these ruins, we will be leaving,” Demeste answers, stopping to look at the assault zealot.

Talessa is tall, broad shouldered, and hard faced and weathered. She is made taller and heavier by the way they rebuilt her. Years ago, a plasma cannon had burst near by her, leaving her wounded, ruined. The way they replaced ruined flesh and bone with machinery, braced her vitals and her spine with metal and ceramic and wiring leaves her crooked, as if her joints are poorly set. Demeste wonders if she’s pained by the augments. Then she wonders if that pain compares to what they’re all feeling now. She needs to keep her sisters from despondency, and to spur them into action.

“This isn’t home, not anymore,” Demeste says, quietly, barely audible over the rush of the storm. Talessa’s expression grows more pained, and for a moment, her hands clench into fists. With a long breath, she closes her eyes and nods. Her hands unclip the twinned bolt pistols at her back, and she racks their slides. With a nod, she walks towards one of the open doors, following her other sisters. Demeste watches her go, and she cycles her own bolter, checking the next room.

She has to choke for a moment, as she shunts open a door to a side chamber. The wind claws its way in, the windows are broken in by whatever tore her home down. Glass carpets the floor in black shards. And in the room, lit in the lumen-flusk glow, are statues of cracked and cooked grey. When Demeste’s hand brushes one of the effigies, it crumbles, and she sees it’s ash, not carved stone. Someone has been flash cooked by some immense heat blast. She shakes her head, seeing that too many of them are sitting, crouched under the windows, sheltering themselves from a death that the walls couldn’t stop. She turns away, locking the door behind her.

Several of her sisters emerge from a side door, their armour and heraldry almost unrecognisable from the smeared ash. Talessa leads them, her pistols locked away. She nods at Demeste. Something in her expression makes Demeste halt.

“Canoness… you might want to look at this.”

  
Demeste, Canoness Commander of the Argent Flame, Twice-Errant-And-Returned, follows her sisters towards a dark secret.

\-------

****  
  


The ship is called the _Ebonpyre_. It had once seen a glorious age of enlightened men, of great and hopeful years that had been a promise. It had, of course, been named something different back then.

Many of its crew didn’t know its true name. Most were too… new, too unfamiliar with it, to know, or too focused on other things to care about a bygone bit of lore, if it doesn’t pertain to the sacred art of warmaking. But he remembers it.

It was called the _Luminous Path_ , and the _Herald of Creation_ and the _Unforgotten Light,_ for the _Ebonpyre_ had pulled herself together from their carcasses when The Long War had lanced and gutted and ruined them. She is radiant crimson and black iron and golden spires that ridge her back and decorate her like an engraved weapon. Gunports and cannon batteries are decorated with gleaming maws of dragons. And where she goes, other vessels would let their alarms squeal and whine as prey would at the sight of an alpha predator.

She is a Baroness of Stars, a thing of daemonic beauty. And she allows them to travel with her, like a shark that lets small fish trail in their shadow.

They are Word Bearers, clad in crimson, marked in the hallowed, sacred tongued etchings of the Holy Argot, the Sires of Truth and those who had compacted with gods.

_And they’re his_ , he thinks for a moment, the stylus in his hand scratching across the paper. He is, like many of his brothers, gargantuan. The pen he has is made for human hands, far smaller than his own. It actually makes him smile, laugh lines pulling the faintest of scarring around, when he thinks about that. He thinks his Legion has lost something, because he no longer hears laughter from them, except when some have their crimson stained with darker reds.

He is Kas Jaerin, a Word Bearer’s Praetor. He is a Son of Colchis, a master of the Legion, from the days when they were something like a Legion. They call him by the title of Monarch of Blades these days, when they feel the need to praise him. And they praise him louder now that their Apostle is dead. An accident of warfare, a painful loss. Losing a Cardinal of their faith is a damaging thing.

He continues his writing, pen scratching neat, slashing marks of Colchisian cuneiform. A distraction. A charcoal sketch dominates most of the page. He’s oddly proud of the rendering of the Wyldkin Daemon. It captures both the technical nature of the creature, with a measure of artistry to give the image the weight, the lethality and terrible beauty the creature has. This one resembles a shambling array of moss, treebark and the antlered skulls of forest elk. He has seen picts of great cervidae from Caliban, with their crests of curling horns, and the resemblance is there.

Kas Jaerin finds himself thinking of all that he has seen, all of the Daemons and the Godlings and capering princelings and haunting shadow-queens of the Warp. Oh yes, there were the four. The Cardinal Four. But there was far, far more beyond them. The courts of minor godlings that had sprung up in farflung corners of the vast Empyrean, of the swathes of lordless Wyld Warp inhabited by primals and elementals. And he had found himself fascinated and drawn to study them.

And it brings him a moment of quiet after the frenetics of war making.

His quiet is disturbed by a rhythmic knocking at his chamber doors, and sets the stylus down. He uses an aerosol to seal the charcoal sketch from smudging. With a sigh, Kas Jaerin rises to his feet and hauls the bulkheads open to see an armoured Astartes looming in the corridor. Jaerin nods to his brother. “Sel. I take it that we’re ready to begin the next phase then.”

Sel Theron, one of the Legion’s remaining Seekers, smiles. Briefly. “Yes. We’ve prepared the materials from the vault. I think it’s time you showed up and began to tell us what we were doing down there.” There’s a hint of accusation in the Legionary’s voice, and Kas Jaerin allows it to pass unremarked. He’s known Sel since the two were initiates, keeps him as a conscience of sorts in these darker days. The Praetor sighs softly, and reaches for a Legion surcoat on the wall. He secures his sword, a ritual duelling blade from Colchis’ wrought larger for a Legionary’s hand, in a large sheath. The grip is two handed, a polished knuckle guard over the throat of the handle. The weapon is masterfully made, acid etched designs of flames and curling runes decorating the blade and guard.

Kas Jaerin settles the belt, smiling at Sel Theron as he strides past him, donning the crimson Legion surcoat. “All in good time, Theron. All in good time. Let us say, I am seeking out a legacy of our Primarch. Something that will make the next few years of our Long War easier. Come. Let us begin our ceremony.”

Kas Jaerin, Praetor of the Seventeenth Legion, True Son of Lorgar, smiles as he walks.

\------

She moves between the crossbars of the old ship’s underbelly, moving from spar to spar with careful, quiet ease. The joints of her armour are padded with torn fabric, and the curve of her helm and the hard edges obscured in a hooded cloak. She knows she cannot be allowed to be seen or heard, and she clings to the ducting as servitors and the ship engineers pass underneath. Part of her wishes to descend amongst them and reap a tally for her fallen sisterhood, to put her weapons to their sacred work.

Her frayed nerves and rationale makes it hard to resist that temptation, causes her to feel some cold, ice-like fury surge through her. But instead she crawls her way along to a culvert where several thick pipes and ducts are rooted, and rests on the curves in the shadows of the vaulted roof. She watches several of the ship’s servants, in their faded, russet robes, opening a metal chest. A hooded, armoured overseer supervises, arms crossed. The fasteners of the chest pop free, and she sees unusual knives in the chest. Cersei leans over the edge of her vantage point, dialling up her visor’s magnification, and sees the curiously knapped edges of each blade. The man nods, stamping a seal on a thick wedge of papers, and the case is closed again, heavy locks shunting closed on it. She ignores the icons in their uniforms, unwilling to pay attention.

Something stirs in her heart. And she knows she needs one of those knives. She has secured a map of some of the warship, planning paths to rooms of importance, checking the chart. It is larger, larger than any vessel she has been on.

Sister Cersei, remnant of the Order of the Argent Flame, Errant Knight-Maiden, sits and waits, unsheathing a gladius, and plans out how best to get vengeance for such miserable treachery.

\-----

The Inquisitor paints the last of the sigils with a last concise brush stroke, and hands off the brush to a savant. They have spent the last two days measuring the room, determining the cardinal points of the room, and calculating the sweep of angles to lay down this sigils and chains to bind their prisoner. Physical restraints of silvered, hexagrammically enchanted chain, every seventh link wrapped with a parchment rich with symbols of binding. The chains end in thick, eight sided stakes topped with engraved skulls. The invisible restraints stem from the curling, painted symbols on the floor. They sweep out from a circle one metre across at the calculated centre of the room. A careful observer would note that the symbols array out of the room in a representation of the Golden Ratio, and the growing curve serves to empower the symbols that he has painted.

He knows that, in case of critical failure in this venture, sixteen explosive charges are anchored in the room, ready to detonate. Outside, forty storm troops are waiting, just in case that is not enough. They are armed appropriately.

He sweeps back to the door, pressing a thumb to a black intervox set by the bulkhead. He can feel, in the back of his skull and in his diaphragm, the curious sensations of the barriers they have made and their… prisoner. It thrums through him like music that has tones beyond normal hearing. Several of his savants, behind their psi-visors, look pale, sick. They have been negatively affected by the phenomena the creature exudes. He thinks several will need to be granted the final mercy to prevent anything from compromising this operation. They are, after all, expendable. They knew that when they took the duty.

“Lower the specimen into the Convergence. We shall begin the interrogation. All savants, prepare Safeguard protocols and begin the operation.”

He feels regret, guilt and revulsion as he watches the ceiling hatch creak open, watches the adamantine casket being lowered by steel cables. Wards crisscross the sides of the armoured coffin, and they seem to glow and flicker. He has had to sacrifice so many others, ignorant of the casket or its importance, to secure it. Loyal men and women had their lives lost because he has identified something critical. He has happened upon something crucial and terrifying and he has pushed on with secrecy. He has saved this from the hands of the enemy.

He prays he has not left enough for his rivals to find out. But time is a fickle, treacherous thing, and… he decides this is not the time to think of this.

  
Simeon Arcorda, Hallowed Inquisitor, Thrice Sworn to the Throne, watches his savants secure the Daemon with chains, and he opens the tome. It is time to speak the devil’s tongue, and learn his secrets.


End file.
